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THURSDAY, Jan. 12, 2012 (MedPage Today) — A veteran researcher at the University of Connecticut, well known for his work on the heart benefits of the red-grape component resveratrol, allegedly fabricated data in 23 papers published over a five-year span, according to an investigation by the university and the U.S. Office of Research Integrity.

UConn said it has begun dismissal proceedings against Dipak K. Das, PhD, director of the school's Cardiovascular Research Center, as a result of the three-year investigation's findings, which documented a total of 145 instances of fabricated and falsified data.

The university also froze all externally funded research in his laboratory and turned away $890,000 in federal grants awarded to him.

In addition, the university has written to the 11 journals that published the papers, which appeared from 2005 to 2009, notifying them of the allegations. None were top-tier clinical medicine journals; they included such titles as Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry and Free Radical Biology.

In a related development, a survey conducted by BMJ of British researchers who had reviewed or submitted papers to the journal found that 13 percent said they had witnessed or had "firsthand knowledge" of misconduct by other researchers, including "adjusting, excluding, altering, or fabricating data."

Half of those had not been properly investigated, the respondents indicated.

Both the Das case and the BMJ survey will raise new questions about the prevalence of research misconduct.

Das could not be reached for comment. UConn's summary report of the investigation indicated that he denied having been responsible for the fabricated or falsified data and that he did not know who had conducted the associated experiments.

Most of the alleged fabrications and falsifications involved Western blot images appearing in the published papers. A review board appointed by UConn officials found dozens that it believed had been deliberately and inappropriately altered.

"In some cases the manipulations appeared to be blots which were spliced together, in others a band (or bands) appeared to be pasted onto an otherwise 'normal' blot," according to the 49-page report.

"Furthemore, the [board] identified multiple instances where individual bands were pasted onto a different background to construct an artificial blot that was not a valid representation of any original data."

UConn began the investigation in late 2008 after officials received an anonymous tip that Das' research was tainted.

The review board added that Das probably could not have performed all the falsifications by himself. "It was clear ... that other Cardiovascular Research Center staff had to have been involved in such actions," the report said.

Six possible suspects have been identified, but their cases are still under review and no formal conclusions have been reached, the report indicated.

Not all the tainted papers involved resveratrol. Several were about mechanisms underlying ischemic preconditioning, reperfusion injury, and other aspects of the cardiovascular effects of oxidative stress.

Moreover, although Das was a prominent and prolific researcher on resveratrol — the PubMed database lists him as an author on 58 papers involving resveratrol — numerous other labs have performed independent studies concluding that the substance has cardioprotective properties.

It's unclear, therefore, to what extent the revelations about Das' research will undercut current thinking about resveratrol's benefits.

The BMJ survey was sent by email to more than 9,000 U.K.-based researchers listed in the journal's manuscript tracking database, with responses from about 2,800.

It had three items: whether respondents knew of instances of altered, excluded, or falsified data; whether they knew of possible research misconduct at their institutions that were not properly investigated; and whether the respondent was primarily an academic or a clinician, or both.

The responses yielded a total of 354 reports of witnessing improper data manipulation (13 percent of respondents) and 163 of uninvestigated misconduct (6 percent).

A PowerPoint summary of the findings noted that the survey had only been sent a week ago and that responses were still coming in.

BMJ editor Fiona Godlee, MB, BChir, MSc, and Elizabeth Wager, chairperson of the U.K. Committee on Publication Ethics, lamented in an editorial that suspicions about the prevalence of research misconduct go back decades, yet institutions have failed to take effective action against it.

Research fraud, they wrote, "is almost certainly flourishing when defined more broadly — as some are now arguing it should be — to include a wide range of questionable behaviors that threaten the integrity of science, including suppression of data and failure to publish research results."

They added that the problem may be especially severe in Great Britain, where no formal mechanism exists for overseeing research integrity and punishing transgressions.

Godlee and Wager identified the U.S. Office of Research Integrity as a step in the right direction, even though its mandate is limited to federally funded research.

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